Monday Memo/Musings - December 9, 2013

A few notes I missed on the Friday Focus:
*Tuesday - Grade Level Meetings agenda includes: K-3 need to update SAGE goals, Math Expressions Pacing and anything else your team needs to discuss.
*Please review our common drill procedures located in the red binder. These include Fire, Tornado, Lockdown, and Administrative Hold.

Monday Musings

It's that time of year when we are all in a "hustle and bustle" to get ready for Christmas while still continuing with everything else going on.  Some of us may be stressed by what seems to be a lack of time to fit it all in the countdown to Christmas.  Please keep in mind that, for some of our students, there are many stressors:

• Parents threatening children that Santa won't come.
• Overhearing parents stressing over money at this time of year.
• Worrying if they'll get anything for Christmas at all.
• Worrying about being away from school (their safest place) for two whole weeks.

We also need to keep our own buckets in check at this busy time of year. The most recent bucket fillers newsletter has a great message:

Good Busy and Bad Busy

There are two types of busy - good busy and bad busy. Good busy fills our bucket. When we do busy well, life is exciting and activities fill our buckets. Our minds are actually designed to be busy just as our buckets are designed to be full. Dr. Caroline Leaf, author of Switch On Your Brain, says that at any given moment of the day, we have four to seven thoughts going through our brain. Just living is a busy activity. But good busy can quickly turn into bad busy and empty our buckets. In good busy, we listen and watch in a focused, mindful way; in bad busy, we lose focus and shift our attention haphazardly from one thing to another. When we're in "bad busy," we tend to look at things more pessimistically and react more negatively. We see more "half-empty" than "half-full." Bad busy leads to bad choices, poor decision making, and emptier buckets. As we enter one of the busiest times of the year, try to stay in "good busy" by doing regular "bucket checks." Stop at regular intervals in your day and become aware of your body and what you are feeling. These feelings, which are neither good nor bad, are actually signals to get your attention. They let you know when good busy is switching to bad busy.      Good busy is living with a full bucket. It's remembering that it's not about the quantity of what we do; it's about the quality of what we do. Any job worth doing, is worth doing well.